Going Home Again
by KimBoo York
The nightmares have returned — the ones every grieving person knows and
waits for. The memories of the ones who have died, and how they died, and
what I have lost. My husband, every night before I go to bed, asks me
pointedly, "You know the rules, right?"
Of course I do. We repeat the rules nightly: "No bad thoughts, no bad
thoughts about our future, and no bad dreams."
The bad thoughts are stress about money and work; the bad thoughts about
our future is my fear of his dying on me; and the bad dreams are the
memories of my parent's deaths. Not that I often get through a full night
without giving in to one or another, but at least, before my eyes close for
the night, I have been reminded of all that is good in the world: love. My
husband loves me, and he doesn't want me hurt by deamons in the dark.
But there the nightmares are. Dreams about that big, scarey, empty house I
grew up in. It wasn't scary or empty when I grew up there, but from the day
Mother was diagnosed with cancer to the day my father died far from home,
it was a house of fear. A house haunted by death, disrepair, and dispair.
I'm not dreaming about it because I fear my own death, though; I'm dredging
up it's virtual floorplan because I miss it.
Home is home, no matter how bad it gets. The horrible carpets, the
incontinent dog, the narrow living room, the flourescent kitchen....it had
to be home, because there was no good reason to stay there if it wasn't.
And actually, our house was a nice big brick ranch on a corner lot, with a
pool and more than enough room for the three of us. We simply did not take
good care of it, which had as much to do with my family living above it's
means as it did with simply not caring. I always had grand designs for it,
though, for when we finally got enough money to renovate. That wall would
come out, that window would become a french door, the patio would get
tiled, the bathrooms expaned and remodeled. Pages and pages of rough,
crudely drawn sketches filled my notebooks, some designs exceeding the
range of both a responsible budget and good taste. But they were my dreams
about my house, and as any home-owner (or anyone who wishes they owned a
home) knows, the important thing is to have a vision and a sense of
belonging to the property. I had both.
It was bright, sunny, proto-typical Florida afternoon on the day I walked
out of those doors for the last time. Mother was nearly two years dead,
Poppa three months gone, and I had no resources to keep the place. It
needed at least $10,000 worth of work — including a new well, a pool
resurfacing, and a completely updated kitchen — just to be sellable or
rentable. And the monthly note was well beyond my means, since I was a
member of the unemployed. So I put father's estate into probate, disavowed
myself of the heavily mortgaged inheritance, and let the bank foreclose.
And suddenly it wasn't home anymore.
I knew that after I left, it would probably be six months before anyone
would legally set foot in it again. I wondered how it would weather the
rest of the brutal tropical summer with no air conditioning running — would
the wallpaper warp? The plaster crack? The carpets mold? Probably. For a
long time, I did not even go near that neighborhood, because I did not want
to see the depths to which my ‘home' had fallen. To loose my parents, my
bearings, and my home...it was too much for me. I had watched in terror and
rage as my parents literally disintigrated in front of my eyes, and I was
not sure I could have been able to take seeing the house go through that
too, without mentally disintigrating myself. I avoided it.
Several months ago, though, my husband, myself, and a close friend were
driving by my old neighborhood (which is, now, very out of the way from
where I live downtown) and I decided to drop in for a visit. My husband was
very uncertain about this inspiration, but I insisted.
We pulled up to find it completely unchanged in appearances, from the
outside. A truck was in the drive, and I pulled up behind it and got out
while my husband and our guest sat uncertainly in the car. After walking
around the front yard, realizing that the elephant ears I had planted for
father were really, really dead and that the fig tree's limbs were still
hanging too low, I went up to the open garage door and looked inside.
Except for being empty of clutter, which it never was when Poppa lived
there, it was the same. Same shelves he built, same tables he built, same
cabinets he had salvaged from some factory somewhere. The door into the
house was open, and looking down the hallway, it too looked the same — that
horrible, ugly, orange linoleum floor that never cleaned up right.
I went inside like I had a thousand time before.
The guy whose truck was parked out front was the new owner. He had gotten
the house for a steal on auction, paying the same price for it my parents
had paid 15 years earlier when they bought it used. He was a friendly
red-neck, a guy who made his living with his hands, which is exactly my
people. The people I come from. Striking up a conversation with him was
easy, and he was more than happy to let me look around the place. He was
renovating it, hopefully to resell at a much higher price, although since
it was such a nice place, he commented, he was thinking of moving his
family in and selling the place where they were now instead. I agreed that
it was certainly a nice place.
And he was making it nicer. He had taken out the carpets — they had molded
like I thought they would, he confirmed — and was putting in a beautiful,
beige tile throughout. The bathrooms were not renovated yet, since he was
concentrating on the kitchen. The new cabinets and tile counter-top were
drop-dead gorgeous. He asked how old the air conditioning unit was, since
there had been no paperwork with the house when he bought it, and was very
pleased when I told him it was just over a year old, installed only six
months before I had walked out for good. We talked about the treehouse out
back that had been mine, which his son now loved, and I explained why the
original kitchen cabinets did not have any doors on them (my mother, the
cook, took them out in frustration, telling my furious father that none of
his tools in the garage were behind doors, so why should hers be?). I
showed my husband where I grew up, and the room we called "The Lab,"
because it was where I did all my studying. He realized that I had not
exaggerated, the living room was incredibly narrow.
As I was walking over tools and explaining what the layout of furniture
had been in the front room, I realized that I was closing a door on
history. It wasn't home anymore, despite the years I had lived there. I
would never explain to my children which room had been their grandmother's,
or where grandfather's dart board had been hung. There would never be a
time when it was my turn to make it my home for my family. It was still a
good home, perhaps even a great home, but it would never be mine. I decided
it was time to leave, for good.
"Why did you give up such a great house?" The guy asked after I had
expressed our thanks and goodbyes. I shrugged.
"It just wasn't home anymore."
Only in my dreams.
The Writing on the Walls
by KimBoo York
My collage is going back up on the wall. It means nothing, as a whole, to
anyone but me. Bits and pieces bring up memories with certain friends, but
not with others. Pictures, notes, ticket stubs, comic strips, movie stills,
brittle Chinese wrapping paper salvaged off a gift from a far-away
friend....these are the little parts that make up my collage, and when put
together, spill over the walls from one room into another.
Every single shred means something to me, either from a trip or a friend
or a lesson learned. Kind of like life, in a way: the pieces are just scrap
paper when unassembled. If someone were to carefully study what the wall
says, they might have a very clear idea of who I am, and what I aspire to
be. But again, like life, the collage is more interesting to people when
taken in chunks. Few people, except your biographer if you are important
enough to rank one, want to examine every small part of your life trying to
explain what you are; as well, there is too much information represented by
the collage to absorb in one viewing. People go from the one group of stuff
to another group further down or up or along, and determine what the
collage means based on their own ideas of what its theme is.
I took the collage down after my mother died, back in our house. Somehow I
knew I was not going to be living there much longer, so I carefully removed
all the paper trash off the walls and packed it carefully into an archival
box. And there it has stayed for almost three years. I have added to the
collage, but only by stuffing new pieces into the box and then closing it
quickly. Now, however, I am opening the box for good.
As I sort through the mess, trying to reassemble it into a reflection of
my life, it makes me think of my mother. I have a hard time remembering
her, really. I mean, how do you remember someone? It is difficult for me to
conjure the person my mother was from my mind. Not because my memories of
her are not vivid — they are. I can visualize her smile, her fingers, her
hair and the way she moved her hands when she talked. Remembering, though,
is more than bits and pieces dredged up from the depths of our mind and
heart; it is living and talking and walking with that person at our side.
It is experiencing the collage of their life.
I can think of events in my mother's life, and the way she looked through
the years. But it is like taking a photo from the collage and holding it in
my hands. I know it is important in its own right, but its true impact can
only be realized in the midst of everything else. Out of context, its
meaning is watered down into sentimentality.
Mother is a part of my collage now. Her own creation, her life, has ended
and, I hope, started anew in some reality I can not imagine. Just little
bits remain in this world: photos of her and notes she sent me while I was
in college and tickets from events we went to together. Her collage has
ended and mine continues....and from what you see on my walls, mother was
just a small portion of my life. What is not visible to anyone but me is
her presence throughout every inch of this creation.
Home Away From Home
by KimBoo York
Our society is as tied to tradition as the ancient Chinese; however, a lot of our traditions go unspoken, unnoticed, unappreciated. One that is never given enough credit is our habit of burying our dead. Even those families, such as mine, who abhorr the thought of eternal internment — due as much to the literary influence of Edgar Allen Poe as it is to our habit of ‘being different' — can not seem to shake the need for cemetaries. For me, being in a cemetary is recognizing some kind of tie to my past, even if no one I know is buried in it. I relate to the dead because I have dead relatives and friends, and I will be dead someday myself. It is a cemetary, a field of the dead, and we just have to admit that death is the great common denominator.
My parents had express wishes to be cremated and their ashes scattered. But their desire to be scattered was never a serious request, I think in reflection. My mother thought of scattering her ashes on the beach because she loves the ocean, and being a romantic, she talked about it a lot (until she was actually diagnosed with cancer, at which time she suddenly refused to talk about it at all). My father, well, I just do not believe he muched cared what I did with him after he died. He once, long ago and in passing, expressed some desire to be scattered in the mountains of his birth, and I cling to that as proof of his 'request.' In fact, though, both my parents just did not give a darn about what I intended to do with their remains. So, I cremated them (and later, their dogs) and now everybody sits up on the top shelf of my closet, taking up space. I simply refuse to put them into the storage unit with the rest of my heirlooms. But one hardly goes to the closet with the same reverence as to a mausoleum, and I have found with the passing of time that I kind of miss my parents' graves. I miss getting mad at the cemetary groundsmen for letting fire ants nest near my parents' headstones; I miss putting unappreciated flowers out for the holidays; and I miss having some place that is, for better or worse, my parents' home.
Which is what cemetaries really are, when you think about. A home for the dead. Another of our society's traditions is to make special ‘homes' for those people whose company we do not like — such as the criminal, the insane, the young and the old — and one group of people that sends chills down society's collective spine is dead people. So we pack them off to their own ‘home' and visit when we feel generous or sentimental.
My parents' home, when they were alive, was hardly the peaceful hearth I imagine in my memories. My parents and I were dysfunctional to a significant degree, although we all liked each other a lot (something, I have learned, that is not true in a lot of families out there). We genuinely got along despite the problems, and even after I left home to grow up (or so I hoped), their house was our home and it was a safe haven from the storms of life. Whenever problems would hit my ship, I'd sail back to their port for my father's wisdom and my mother's cooking, and their dogs' unconditional affection.
Of course my parents' home in death would hardly come close to the one they had in life. But at least a grave would be something I could go to and just BE. It would be their place, so therefore it would be my place — not having it, now, I feel cheated of something special. We go to graves to remember our families and our history, and I suppose a lot of that is just tradition to most people. Too bad. I think a home can be a wonderful place to visit, if you love the owners.
The New Troy
by KimBoo York
When I was young, my greatest fascination was with dead things: dead dinosaurs, dead species, dead civilizations. In my adult years, this obsession crystalized in the form of a degree in anthropology. With my love of writing and reading, though, I easily could have gone into the Classics — except for the fact that I was generally annoyed by mythology.
Mythology might not of happened, and probibly did not happen. To me, that did not make a story mysterious and wonderful; to me, it was a handicap. No fossilized evidence? No Rosetta stone? No buried cities? Then what, I wondered, was the point? I loved the stories that had actually transpired, the ones whose tragedy was not symbolic, but real.
My mother was driven to distraction by this fascination with ‘reality' that I had inherited from my ever-pragmatic father. A lover of great literature, and particularly the classic myths of Greece, Rome, and Germany, she worshipped the glorious epics of love and adventure which to her were the genesis of modern literature. I, on the other hand, was bored. In frustration — and never being one to give up until she got the last word in — she finally resorted to the story of Troy, which was not only mythology, but was an actual, ancient city that had been excavated.
It was a personal triumph for her, because I ate it up. Every fragment of my 10 year old being was obsessed with the story of Troy, both the classic epic by Homer and the classic excavation by Schiller. Troy, the mysterious, long forgotten land of fierce warriors and clashing monarchies, with its brilliant gold and ancient alleyways. The story had been captured by words, and while the city was forgotten by succeeding civilizations, its truth had laid buried for centuries, just waiting to see the light of day and prove once and for all that some myths are real.
When my mother died, and later, my father, I revisited Troy. Not just because I had to go through every single blasted book we owned before moving out of the family house, but because I suddenly understood how myths are actually born:
A myth is history with no one left to remember it.
I have mountains of photos of my family, the most resisliant of which might last a century. I have the reel-to-reel tapes, delicate and badly damaged by time, that my parents recorded and sent to each as ‘spoken letters' during the dark years of Poppa's service in South-East Asia. I have a couple of portraits and a few boxes of letters. And that, really, is my Troy. My childhood is nothing but transitory pieces of brittle paper and tape that, when gone, will leave no trace of how I grew up. As an only child, I have no brothers or sisters to share childhood memories with, and the rest of my family — aunts and uncles and all those cousins — were very removed from my youth.
There are a few people who remember patches here and there, but the people who knew my every waking moment from birth until I left for college are gone. I reference things my husband was not there for, events for which I am the only living survivor, times and places that I and no one else can remember. This is not simply the disappearence of one cherished relationship from my time frame — I am talking about my entire childhood. Poof, it's gone, and all I am is all I have ever been and all I will ever be.
No one is left to look at my existance now as simply a part of a greater whole, because the truth of the tale was lost when my parents died. That made the story of my life very transitory and ephemeral, like ruins that suggest a history that few know, and no one can believe.
My childhood is a myth now; this is my new Troy.
COZY
by
KimBoo York
I am sick, lying in bed after a long day of wheezing, coughing, sniffling, and whining. My husband, Mike, is in the kitchen, working on a palatable dinner for me (I'm mercilessly picky when I'm sick). I can hear the dishes clattering and rattling through the bedroom door. The room is dark, and the only light shines in from under the door. In this small apartment, the bedroom faces both the kitchen and the living room, and Mike has studiously been keeping the door closed all evening so as not to disturb me with his distractions. It works, but I can still hear him.
He is out there in the kitchen, trying to force his 6'7", 280# frame into the humble stature of Florence Nightingale, which is something new for him. I lie in bed, not worrying about the bills, the dogs, or the day of work I missed; since I am sick with the flu, I have an official exemption from daily life. This whole scene is very mundane, and since I am miserable to boot, all I am trying to do is get as deep under the covers as I can and fall asleep. But I keep awake, listening for something — and I have finally figured out who.
Mine was a military family, and my father was an officer in the Air Force who spent a lot of time in the air. TDY — temporary duty — was the code-word for "Daddy's going to be gone for a week," so as a very young girl, maybe 2, 3, and 4, I spent most of my life with Mother waiting for my father to come home. But even when he was home, I never saw him in the mornings. Poppa was often out of the house by 6:30 AM, and as a spoiled little girl I had the luxury of sleeping in until 7:30 or 8 AM.
I remember lying in my child's bed in my room, with the light from the hall spilling under my door, listening to my parents fix breakfast and start their day. I have always been a sound sleeper, and from the day I was born, I think they just got used to never worrying about waking me up. I was fully awake, though, listening for the muffled voices and the clatter of dishes in the kitchen that signaled to me that all was right with the world. I knew nothing of bills and bosses and home repairs; all I knew was that if I heard those certain sounds in the morning, my world was safe and secure. Mother would fix me breakfast soon, working around my father's used plate in the sink, and we would spend another day walking on the beach or at the zoo while we waited for Poppa to come home.
I remember that sense of security vividly. I led a charmed life as a child, something I have come to really respect as I grow older. Many people, my husband included, have no idea what I am talking about when I mention my parents' unconditional love for me, the significant amount of time they took to play with me, and the way they made sure I knew I was loved, respected, and appreciated. My whole life as a little girl can be summed up with the image of me lying on my stomach, watching for the shadows my parents cast down the hall, and listening for the dishes in the kitchen. My mother would come in after Poppa had left and wake me up, if I hadn't wandered out into the hall already by 8 AM, and fix me my favorite breakfast of soft-boiled eggs on toast. While our schedule revolved around his job, our lives revolved around each other, and I took for granted the attention and affection I would receive from her every day. She accepted all the worries of life on her shoulders, and no matter what was going wrong or how upset I might get about something, she was Mother and would make it all okay.
It was a truth I knew every morning when I heard those sounds outside the bedroom door. So, really, I may be an adult orphan lying in bed at night suffering from the flu, with a loving husband in the kitchen trying to figure out how to cook using my mother's cast iron skillets (he's so used to Teflon....), but my heart and soul are listening to my parents outside that door. Those noises mean that my mother is there, protecting me and looking out for me. I have no bills to pay, no boss to appease, and my problems will be solved for me — and I cuddle deeper under the covers and fall asleep, cozy, knowing that all is right with my world.
Grieving Futures
by
KimBoo York
I miss my mother's smile, I miss her sharp wit and profound intelligence. I remember her hands — those long, elegant, royal fingers — and the boadacious rings she would wear on them. It is all part of her whole personality, the sometimes caustic but always loving person who was my mother. When your mother dies, you wrap up all those little treasures and place them near your heart, to remember her by.
But what I really miss about Mother, what breaks my heart everyday, is her tomorrow. She doesn't have a tomorrow with me, or with Poppa, or here on this mortal realm at all. I terribly miss my future with my mother, the woman who took care of me and protected me. I grieve for the day that will never come.
I miss my mother, but I truly grieve for the woman I never got to know: my mother, the person. In a way, I am jealous of her, since she had the chance to see me grow from an infant into a woman, and watch all the amazing changes and realizations that passed through me. But I only knew ‘Mother.' I saw the incredible potential she had to develop in her own life as a woman, but she was taken from me before she could do it. I was only 24 when Mother died at the age of 51, so where she had the chance to watch me grow up, I will never get to see her mature.
It would so cliche to dwell on how she wasn't there at my wedding, and how she will not be around to hold her grandchild (should I ever have one...). And the fact is, I do miss sharing the usual milestones of life with her. I wish she had stayed to see my first nationally published article, or could help me celebrate when I finally sell that book....she had a way of making me feel so special and so privileged on occasions like that. That is because she adored the written word, subjecting me to Shakespeare and Shelly with equal excitement, and refining my own craft with the sharpened edge of her merciless red editing pen — along with her unending faith in my elusive ‘talent.' Those are selfish memories though; I miss her because having her here would make me feel better.
The fact is that she loved to write as well, and I still have boxes of her often pointless but refined literary exercises. A product of her time and of her own insecurities, she never reached that point in life to turn her energies toward a positive future for herself. Her writing was more practiced and better developed than mine will ever be, but she never once tried to get published. Was it a lack of faith in her own abilities? A fear of rejection? Cancer cut short her opportunity to find out. That makes me maddest of all. She was a font of potential that she never had the chance to realize — and I, as her daughter, see that more keenly than anyone else who ever knew her. I know the dreams she had, and remember her hopes that were dashed by a wicked illness. Even more than how much I miss my tomorrow with her, this is the tomorrow I miss most of all: her own.
I can't honestly say I miss everything about her future, though — she would have made a formidable mother-in-law for my precious husband, Mike, and she had very sharp opinions about what I was supposed to do with my life. I truly don't miss trying to live up to her ideals of me. But even so, life today seems a bit emptier without the challenge.....and tomorrow is missing something. Someone.
Background Courtesy
Martha's Kitchen Banner Courtesy Chougui Works